More Coffee

Time for a coffee post – because it’s been a while – and you should always make time for a coffee post.

I ran across this one yesterday. It lists the presidential candidates and their coffee choices:

Hillary Clinton: Sometimes black, sometimes with cream
John Edwards: Doesn't drink it
Barack Obama: Black (but rarely drinks it)
Bill Richardson: Cream
Rudy Giuliana: Splenda, Sweet'n Low or Equal,
Mike Huckabee: Splenda
John McCain: Cappuccino or coffee with cream and sugar
Mitt Romney: Doesn't drink it (Mormon)
Fred Thompson: Cream

Then today, Lileks Bleats about having to beg the waitress for coffee at the Convention Grill.

I took (G)Nat to the Convention Grill tonight, something we’d been putting off for a long time. I begged the waitress for some coffee, and she said it might be a while; they had to make some. I wanted to bring out my copy of the National American Restaurant Charter, an important document written in 1912, which states, without preamble, codicils, amendments or secret protocols that there shall always be coffee available to succor the needy and enbrisken the spirits. One could say that the assertion of immediate coffee as a right, not a boon to be granted at the owner’s whims, was one of the founding concepts of American restaurants, and one of the things that made this country great. If a bit jittery. We’ve gotten away from the idea, what with the Starbucks paradigm and the general acceptance of standing and waiting for your coffee drink to be assembled from raw materials. It’s a bad sign. A nation that always has a hot pot on the Bunn-o-Matic burner is a nation that can deal with Hitler.

“You don’t have any coffee?” I asked, weakly.

“We don’t have any made right now,” she said.

That’s the same thing, I wanted to say. To quote Felix Unger, you have to make coffee. It doesn’t just come. Words to live by. Infinitely applicable.

Eventually the coffee was brought, and my sense of weariness and desperation was so apparent she left the pot.